Dr. Khanna has been a member of the faculty of the Harvard Business School since 1993, where he studies, and works with, multinational and indigenous companies and investors in emerging markets worldwide. He has served as course head of the required Strategy course in the Harvard MBA program, and chaired the executive education program on Strategy, Leadership & Governance. Currently, he teaches in Harvard's comprehensive general management executive education programs. He earned a Bachelors of Science in Engineering degree from Princeton University in 1988, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1993. His current research focuses on understanding the drivers of entrepreneurship worldwide. As part of the Emerging Giants project, he seeks to understand how to build world-class companies from emerging markets worldwide. A related project, The Dragon and the Elephant, zeros in on China and India, and identifies best practices for local entrepreneurs and multinationals operating in each of these two countries. His scholarly work is published in a range of journals over the past fifteen years. During this time, he has continued to serve as a co-editor of several prestigious economics and management journals. A forthcoming book, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures and Yours, will be published by Harvard Business School Press (Penguin in South Asia) in 2007. Numerous articles in the Harvard Business Review (e.g. Emerging Giants: Building World Class Companies in Emerging Markets, 2006) and Foreign Policy (e.g. Can India Overtake China?, 2003) distil the implications of this research for practicing managers. Professor Khanna's work has been profiled in news-magazines around the world, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and newspapers in China, India, and elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. He serves on the advisory boards of several multinational and emerging market companies in the financial services, automotive, life sciences and agribusiness sectors. He is also actively involved in mentoring startups in Asia, and with volunteering time with non-profits in India, e.g. the Parliamentary Research Services in New Delhi, which seeks to provide non-partisan research input to India's Members of Parliament in advance of legislative sessions with a view to enhancing the quality of democratic discourse. In 2007, he was nominated to be a Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum. He makes his home in Newton, MA, with his wife, daughter and son.

Tarun Khanna, Professor at Harvard Business School, summarizes insights from one of his books by comparing private and public rights in India and China. Khanna argues that in India, private rights are favored over the public interest whereas in China the opposite is true. These tradeoffs affect the nature of doing business in each country and development. Elsewhere in his presentation, Khanna also suggests that India and China differ in that India has weak hard infrastructure (roads, etc.) but strong soft infrastructure (human assets, etc.) whereas in China the opposite is true, a duality that is clearly related to the public and private rights distinction discussed in this video segment.

Tarun Khanna, Professor at Harvard Business School, speaks about the incredible change in aspirations among young people in India. Whereas in the past young people aspired to become government officials, today they aspire to become entrepreneurs and lift themselves out of poverty by their own actions. Khanna reflects that this change in attitudes is inspiring and very good for the country.

Tarun Khanna, Professor at Harvard Business School, argues that the old equation that government = inefficient does not hold unilaterally but depends on the context. To illustrate, Khanna describes the evolution of the Communist Party of China and its efforts to co-opt entrepreneurs so that now the government and entrepreneurship is very closely integrated. In contrast, Khanna suggests that in India entrepreneurs keep their distance from the government.

Tarun Khanna, Professor at Harvard Business School, highlights the ability of entrepreneurs to provide solutions to social problems by telling the story of a cardiac hospital in India. Khanna points out that the founder, a cardiac surgeon and entrepreneur, has been able to achieve incredible results unmatched by private or public institutions around the world by rethinking the scale on which healthcare is delivered. Khanna emphasizes that this kind of entrepreneurship can solve social problems in ways that often governments cannot.